Sitecore Saga

Subscribe
·

One Year of SitecoreAI, and What I’m Watching for at Symposium 2026

Alex Lentz

Title card: One Year of SitecoreAI, and What I'm Watching at Symposium 2026. SitecoreAI post on Sitecore Saga.

Symposium 2026 is two weeks out (November 10-12, back at the Walt Disney World Dolphin in Orlando), and it’s almost exactly a year since XM Cloud became SitecoreAI. Feels like a good time to look back before the next round of announcements lands.

The year, from a developer’s chair

Here’s what actually changed for those of us writing the code, roughly in order:

  • November 2025 – SitecoreAI and Sitecore Studio. The rename was no migration and no code change. The real news was Studio – Agentic Studio, App Studio, Marketplace and Connect – and the Marketer MCP.
  • December – React2Shell. A CVSS 10 in React Server Components reminded everyone that App Router apps and Marketplace apps are real servers that need patching like anything else.
  • January – decoupled deployments went GA. Front-end deploys without rebuilding the CM. Probably the single biggest day-to-day quality-of-life improvement this year.
  • March – Content SDK 2.0. Next.js 16, middleware.ts became proxy.ts, Cloud SDK folded into Content SDK, search arrived and agent skills shipped in the starter. Same month, Marketplace apps got documented access to the Marketer MCP.
  • June – JSS 22.x end of life, and Sitecore acquired Scrunch, which tells you exactly where they think discovery is going.
  • July – Package Designer retired in favor of the Content Transfer and Item Transfer APIs.
  • August – XP 10.5 for the folks staying on XP, and Content SDK 2.3 with faceted search.
  • September – a more connected SitecoreAI, with the apps unified into one shared experience with single sign-on and consistent navigation.

Put it all together and the direction is pretty clear. Less customization of the platform itself, more extension through APIs, the Marketplace and agents. And a much bigger bet on AI, both for authoring and for how content gets discovered.

What went well

  • Content SDK. It’s leaner than JSS, it moves fast, and the release notes have been honest about breaking changes. The agent skills in the starter were a smart move.
  • The Marketplace. Building extensions as standalone apps instead of patching the CM fits a SaaS world way better than what we used to do.
  • Deployment. Decoupled deployments and the transfer APIs made environments feel a lot less fragile.

What I’d like to see improve

  • Naming churn. XM Cloud vs SitecoreAI, Pages vs Page builder, Design Library vs Design Studio. The docs say “XM Cloud” in some places and “SitecoreAI” in others, and new folks on my team find it confusing. It’s getting better, but it’s been a long tail.
  • Pace vs stability. I love the release velocity, but two majors of an SDK plus a router change in about a year is a lot for client teams to absorb. Longer overlap on breaking changes would help.
  • Agent governance. The tools for building agents are moving faster than the guidance on governing them. I’d love to see more opinionated patterns from Sitecore on permissions, approvals and audit trails for agentic changes.

What I’m watching for at Symposium 2026

  • Scrunch inside SitecoreAI. How does the Agent Experience Platform show up for developers? Is there an API, a Content SDK integration, or is it marketer-facing only?
  • Agentic Studio, year two. Less “look what an agent can do” and more “here’s how you run agents safely in production at scale”, hopefully.
  • Marketer MCP and Agent API changes. New tools, finer-grained permissions and better ways to scope what an agent is allowed to touch.
  • Content SDK roadmap. Where the App Router story lands, and what’s next after 2.x.
  • Pathway results. Real migration numbers from real customers, not just slides.
  • XP’s future. 10.5 shipped. What’s the message for customers staying on XP for the next few years?

If you’re going to be in Orlando and want to talk shop, ping me on LinkedIn. I’ll do the developer cheat sheet again once the announcements are out – that seemed to help people last year.

Resources

Alex Lentz

Alex Lentz

Senior Solutions Architect at Americaneagle.com and two-time Sitecore Technology MVP. Building on Sitecore since 2013, mostly SitecoreAI and headless Next.js these days.

LinkedIn    GitHub

←

Keep reading